You made 40 decisions today.
Thirty-seven of them weren't yours to make.
Your Head of Sales could've made six.
Your CTO could've made nine.
Your ops lead could've made the rest.
But they all landed on you. Because you never told them otherwise.
ONE LEADERSHIP TIP
The decision didn't need you. The absence of a boundary did.
Founders are great at making calls. They're terrible at noticing which calls were never theirs. Someone asks "what do you think we should do?" and instead of asking why they're asking, the founder just answers. Every time. It feels like leadership. It's actually just a habit nobody's broken.
Here's what's actually happening: unclear ownership creates anxiety, and anxiety looks for the fastest authority in the room. That's you. Not because you're the best-informed person, usually you're not, the person asking is closer to the data than you are, but because you're the path of least resistance. Every time you answer instead of redirecting, you teach your team that decisions route through you by default.
I've walked into companies where the founder is personally approving discount percentages, PTO requests, and copy edits on a landing page. Not because those decisions need a founder. Because nobody ever told the team they didn't.
The real problem isn't the decision. It's that you've never defined what's reversible, repeatable, and closer to someone else's desk than yours.
When your team knows what they own, what they don't, and where the line sits, they stop asking. When they don't know that, every judgment call becomes a Slack message with your name on it.
The takeaway: Every decision that lands on your desk by default is a boundary that was never drawn. The question is: why hasn't it been drawn yet?
ONE COMPANY WORTH KNOWING
Valve — the gaming company behind Steam — runs with almost no formal management layer at all. No assigned managers, no fixed reporting lines. Employees decide what to work on, and desks literally have wheels so people can roll toward the problem they've chosen to own.
It sounds chaotic. It isn't. It works because Valve replaced management with clarity: everyone knows what "good" looks like, what they're accountable for, and what they're free to decide without asking. The wheels are a gimmick. The decision clarity underneath them isn't.
The lesson: You don't need more managers to remove yourself from decisions. You need the people already there to know exactly where their authority starts.
ONE THING TO ACT ON
Do this before next Sunday.
Open Slack or your inbox. Find the last three decisions someone brought to you that you answered without asking why it landed on you.
For each one, answer one question: could the person asking have made this call themselves, with the information they already had?
If yes, that's not a decision. That's a policy you haven't written down. Write the one-sentence boundary and post it back to them today: who owns this now, and what's the edge of their authority.
You don't need a delegation framework. You need to hand back three decisions this week and see what breaks. Usually, nothing does.
I ran this exact audit with a Series A CEO last month. We found 11 decision categories routing through him that had nothing to do with strategy. Three boundary messages later, his inbox dropped by a third — not because he worked faster, but because he stopped being the default.
If that sounds like where you are — let's talk →
See you next Sunday.
— Alisa
Fractional COO · Executive Adviser · Keynote Speaker
Helping founders and senior leaders scale themselves, not just their business.
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